


I Am You

by mymotheristherepublic



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age II
Genre: Backstory, Canon Related, Elf Malcolm Hawke (Dragon Age), Elf-Blooded Hawke (Dragon Age), Fantastic Racism, Flashbacks, Gen, I'm ignoring Bioware's canon about elf-blooded humans and I do not accept criticism, Mage Hawke (Dragon Age), Misgendering, Trans Character, Trans Hawke (Dragon Age)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-20
Updated: 2019-09-20
Packaged: 2020-10-24 22:36:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20713664
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mymotheristherepublic/pseuds/mymotheristherepublic
Summary: Regarding the quest "Wayward Son." Percy Hawke empathizes with Feynriel, and in doing so, recalls his own life and hardships as an elf-blooded apostate.





	I Am You

**Author's Note:**

> I published this on Tumblr a long time ago, but since I don't use Tumblr much anymore, I thought I would publish it here as well. This is going to be part of a multi-chapter fic regarding my Dragon Age 2 canon, but since I have this written, and it stands on its own fairly well, I want people to be able to read what I've written.

_“I am you.”_

•

When Percy’s magic first manifests, he is seven years old, and a songbird lies dead at his feet. He picks it up in his apron, tears brimming on his eyelashes, walks to the barren tree beside the house. Mother and father have enough to fret about; the twins are hardly a month old. They don’t have to know, he tells himself as his clumsy hands scrape up a grave between the roots. No one has to.  
He sits against the side of the old wooden shack, and his hands are raw, and the beds of his nails are dirt black. It shouldn’t have happened. He only wanted it to stop chirping while he hung the family’s clothes to dry. So many things are grating, it could just as easily have been a dog or a cart wheel on the dry mud road or one of the…  
No, he doesn’t want to think about that.  
The ends of his fingers still crackle. Not painfully, but like static when his mother combs his hair too fast. When he touches his legs, he gives them a small shock. It doesn’t hurt enough to bring tears back; the thoughts are worse.  
This wasn’t supposed to happen. He heard his father a few nights ago, when he shouldn’t have, praying in hushed tones. _Maker, don’t let them be like me. Don’t let them share this burden._ Father loves him, he knows he does. He loves him enough that he begs the Maker not to give his children magic.  
Mother and father fuss over the babies enough that he can keep to himself the next two days, shutting his eyes, balling his fists if he feels that spark at his fingertips. He waits for his chores to cry. He is alone then, not a burden on the others. But father notices him soon enough.  
“It is only a curse,” he says, once Percy has already spilled a bucket of water from the well and taken him to the overturned dirt beneath the tree, “if you let it become one.”  
“What if I do?”  
Father kneels down beside the bird’s shallow resting place. “You’re a good person. You can make it good again.”

•

A fabric merchant passing through their village is the first person he hears call his father a knife-ear. Bethany needs something warm for the winter; she’s smaller than Carver, cries if she isn’t bundled up against the cold, shivers and won’t eat when the wind blows through the cracks in the walls. Father promised to use his few extra coins to buy cloth, make her something to get her through the season before she outgrew it.  
“Five silvers,” the man grumbles, a length of plain, tan fabric beneath his arm.  
Father clutches his coin purse. “You sold it to the woman before me for three.”  
“Maybe she bought less.”  
His eyes narrow. “It’s for a child, ser. I don’t need much. Cut it down if you need to.”  
“Five silvers, that’s the price, can’t go cutting inches to save you money.” The man shakes his head. “Can’t help that knife-ears don’t have the money.”  
Father doesn’t flinch, even though Percy feels the anger and sadness and hurt rising in him. He simply slides five coins over the counter the merchant has set up in the marketplace, takes the bundle with no less of a sincere ‘thank you’ than he gave the baker who let Percy have a day old cookie. They are far out of the man’s earshot before father finally says,  
“I’m sorry you heard that. Not everyone is…kind to elves, you know that.”  
“What did he call you?”  
“Knife-ear.” Father takes his hand. “It’s alright. It’s not the worst he could have done. Don’t tell your mother, I’ll take care of it.”

•

He hates his face. The way his ears are too thin and stick out too far. How wide his eyes are. The slender shape of his jaw. He tries to press a dent above his nose with a stick one day, gets a splinter instead.  
They say elf-blooded children look human. “You can’t ever tell,” he hears a wealthy woman on the road through Lothering tell her son. “There’s tainted blood in too many lines. One mutt bitch ruins the litter.” But he can tell. The blood she speaks of must be muddied and long since touched by anything other than human. It’s impossible not to see the faces of every elf begging on the side streets when he catches his reflection. He doesn’t hate them. He hates that he hates, how much he hates, what he hates.  
Mother kisses the bridge of his nose after she pulls out the splinter and smiles. He’s still sniffling, blubbering that he wishes he were normal, that no one called father names, that he wasn’t afraid of the Templars in the town Chantry.  
“Hush, dear,” she says. “There’s nothing wrong with you.”  
He sputters something unintelligible, and she answers by resting her chin on his head and holding him close. Her dress smells of the harsh soaps she uses to wash their clothes, with a faint hint of the Orlesian perfume she’s kept with her as long as he can remember. No matter what, he thinks, he will keep that scent with him. Few things feel safer.

•

The sunset is yellow with storm clouds, heralding an unlikely rain to water the crops. The grayish clusters more often bring dry thunderstorms, at best a drizzle that has practicality become fog before it dampens the ground.  
Bethany, five years old and whimpering from a skinned knee, clings to his hand and her basket of eggs from the chicken coop. He smiles when she looks up. She wipes her nose on her sleeve and grins back. One front tooth is missing–her left, only a week after Carver lost his right–and her round cheeks are red from the heat. He loves Carver, of course, but Bethany has been the closest thing to a friend since she could talk.  
Bethany notices the commotion before Percy. Her smile turns down, and her curls bounce as she turns her head to the commotion across the way. She is too young to look so frightened; his first instinct is to bring her inside just to calm her, but her feet are rooted to the dirt.  
He sighs. “Bethany, let’s go.”  
She points a chubby finger at the scene holding her attention, and Percy follows its path.  
The boy’s name is Arne. He’s a couple years older than Percy, stocky, with a crooked mouth and dark, splotchy skin. They were never the closest friends, but he’d known Arne since his parents came to the village from further south. The family was elven, and took pains to be kind to the Hawke children. Arne only ever seemed interested in Percy.  
His face is not stuck in its usual permanent smirk. What must have been a struggle has turned to solemn tears and resignation; there is a Templar on each of his arms, and his mother barely being restrained at the door of their home by another.  
“Filthy Chantry bastards!” she screeches. “I hope your mothers curse themselves for not smothering you as infants! I hope they spit at the sight of you! I–”  
The Templar holding her back grasps her by the hair with his sharp, armored fingers until she yields, kneeling. Arne’s father doesn’t move at all.  
“Who told you?” she asks, barely audible from the spot behind the coop where Percy has dragged his sister.  
The Templar watches as his comrades hoist her son into a wagon. “Local, asked to remain anonymous, saw your son using magic a week ago.”  
Arne’s mother laughs bitterly. “Was it the Hawkes? Maker knows they’re always watching. Their oldest was with my son half the time, I know I’ve seen her at the Chantry too.”  
“Don’t you understand what anonymous means? Rabbit bitch.”  
Percy doesn’t take Bethany out of their hiding place until Arne’s parents are securely inside. She won’t share the blame, he decides, undeserved as it may be.  
Father doesn’t want to tell him to keep quiet. But Percy knows as well as he does–show another mage support, raise more suspicions. They leave the village before more Templars arrive. They’ll always come back once they find a mage, father says, to make sure there aren’t more.  
“Are you afraid they’ll know who you are?” Percy whispers as they unpack his bedding.  
Father stops, grasps his hand. “I know what the Circle is like, I could endure. But I pray you never need to.”  
Percy nods, and promises himself he won’t ask.

•

He holds Bethany’s hands when she first sparks a fire from her fingers. She’s twelve, doesn’t cry as she stares at the black mark where Percy smothered it; she’s watched her father and brother train her whole life, she knows it can be tamed like any other feral force.  
“I’m sorry,” he says.  
Bethany frowns. “Don’t be sorry.”  
Percy squeezes her hands. But Bethany’s gaze is wistful, as if she’s found a spare coin on the road and is already contemplating how to spend it. She has none of the weight he and father bear day to day, none of the worry heavy on her brow.  
“I’ll protect you, I want you to know that.” Percy kneels to her eye level. “No one’s coming to take you, or me, or father–”  
“I know.”  
He grins, brushes a bouncy black curl from Bethany’s forehead. She won’t stay this way. The fear will settle in, he convinces himself, but he’ll take comfort in her optimism as long as he can.  
She is eighteen when she dies, Percy is twenty five. Perhaps it is that shred of pride and quiet bravery that sent her to face the monster, like a knight staring down her dragon.  
When she is still twelve and bright-eyed, she skips after him to train with father and proudly states, “They don’t understand. Magic is good. We can help people, Percy.”  
And he wishes, years later, that he’d taken that chance instead.

•

_Feynriel’s eyes widen as bluish flame flickers above Percy’s palm, almost fearful. He remembers crescents of dirt beneath his nails, and the old tree he hung the clotheslines from, and he smiles as father would have.  
“Maybe there’s another way.”_


End file.
